Gone Home: Gentle Gaming Takes Aim at Shooters

One of the gifts bestowed upon a grateful 2012 has been the rise of gentle-gaming, intellectually exploratory adventures like Dear Esther and Journey, tales with actual ideas. They float into our lives, thanks to busy little teams driven by a sunny desire to tell great stories.

One such, lined up for a 2013 release on PC, is Gone Home by The Fullbright Company, a team of three people who worked on the BioShock franchise. It’s a first-person exploration game in which a young woman explores a house, searching for clues about missing family and the mysteries of other residents.

Exit Theatre Mode

There are no shoot-outs, no collection missions, no complex multi-item puzzle-solving. There is no leaping or smashing or cervical dislocation. There is looking and moving and finding. The entire piece is a puzzle, rather than a collection of puzzles.

To contrast this slow, thoughtful wandering story with the “AAA” games we saw at E3 - intense, colorful renditions of gross brutality - is to stretch out one’s arms and feel, at each fingertip, the gap between two extremes of gaming, between the electric thrill of destruction and the touch-feely meanderings of more tender chronicles.

Some of us, unmoved or even uncomfortable about yet another foray into the death-mills of cybertronic futurescapes or the meat-arcades of central Asian war zones, are attracted to the novelty of interacting with objects whose function is not to dismember, with characters who have been created for more than the sole purposes of an amusing expiration.

There are plenty of games - especially in this age of downloadable delights - that do not go in for all that. But the world can be divided roughly into extremes of commercially impressive mega-hits involving killing guys, and more discreet affairs that attempt to portray existence in hues other than crimson.

Steve Gaynor, co-founder of The Fullbright Company says, “In a lot of games it definitely feels like you're just going through the motions. There'll be a lot of interesting stuff going on and then, wait, you're just going to have to shoot those hundred dudes. So you have to deal with them, before you can do more interesting stuff.”

He adds, “We want to make a game that is only about the stuff we're interested in; this feeling of being immersed in a place and being able to inhabit and investigate it. It cuts out the stuff that a lot of people, including ourselves, are tired of, which is shooting a hundred dudes.”

‘Shooting a hundred dudes’ is traditional gaming, born of an entertainment niche aimed at lads and carried, on the backs of powerful technologies, to its inevitable horizon. The other is new, or at least owning the aura of newness. It embraces the traditional audience grown older, greying gently around the temples, and gamers still youthful and hungry for different experiences. And also, yes, new audiences, people who have no special desire to drop in, knife-between-teeth, on a tent-full of hapless Persian fellows, waiting patiently to die.

Gaynor says, “I want this to be accessible to kids who are PC gamers, who play the newest stuff on Steam and who like stories in games. But there is some evidence that smaller and more slow-paced games that are reminiscent of point-and-click adventure, appeal to people in an older age group. Which is great, because I feel like, in a lot of cases there is not as much in the games industry that actually serves people who are experienced with what games can do, and are looking for something new and a little bit less in-your-face and extreme and ‘boom-headshot’.”

Interestingly, the game is set in the mid-1990s, a period piece that side-steps standard adventure-ish settings like Victoriana or (yawn) steampunk. The idea is to serve up a world that’s a lot like ours, but, in fact, is freakishly different in crucial ways.

“Some of it is practical,” says Gaynor. “We wanted to keep it grounded, but we didn't want to start asking questions about logging on to the computer or just calling somebody on my cell phone? The lower tech era helps us a lot, because there's going to be a lot more analog stuff to find. Books that are actually physical books, notes that people have left for each other, letters that came in the mail.”

But - and here’s another nod to those greying heads - nostalgia is also a factor. “It’s interesting to be doing a period piece that's only 15 or 20 years in the past, and trying to capture that moment that people who are playing the game might remember clearly from their lives. They can recall it and feel familiar in that space and in that time. That familiarity of direct connection to the place and to the experience, I think, is going to be really important, this nostalgic feeling that goes along with the exploration and all of the more mechanical stuff is a big part of the experience.”

One of the big inspirations to the team, inevitably, is BioShock. It is one of those rare games that pulls together the old gaming of shooting and bashing and the new gaming of chunky stories and tongue-tingling atmosphere.

Gaynor says, “I was drawn to the BioShock franchise based on the atmosphere and the darkness and isolation, the feeling like you're really in this place that has a presence. And so I felt very fortunate to be able to work on that series. We learned a ton about the specifics of what makes an experience like that work. Because there's the surface elements, the feeling that you get as a player, and then there's really digging into how you get that across. We're definitely carrying over a lot of best practices and ideas that we had while we were working on that stuff.”